The Last Spectator
by Mistress Siana
Summary: What is worse, to remember nothing or to remember everything? The war is over. Severus and Bellatrix are living their hell.


The Last Spectator

I don't know why you've chosen this room, you never were one for dancing. But as always, I find you here, in your parents' old ballroom, sitting on the window-sill, staring into infinity. I watch you sometimes. Your breath clouds the glass between you and the world and you ignore it, as you ignore me, ignore everything; you simply sit there, motionless, until night falls and the darkness outside turns the window into a mirror. You shriek at the face you don't recognize as your own and slam your fists against the glass until it breaks.

I then heal your cuts and put the pieces back together as though putting the pieces back together were always that easy.

And there is hardly anything else left. Your life is a mosaic of petty relics, a picture book of worn black leather and the old ballet shoes of the dancer you just never were (your sisters were, I remember, they were daughters just after your mother's taste. You, however, have always been your father's child). You are a shadow of a human being now, forever trapped here, in the house of your childhood. I'm merely a spectator in your nightmare, a ghost wandering through your memories; I mend the glass, I numb the pain in your damaged nervous system, I feed you sleeping potions if a fit shakes you at night, but most of the time, I watch. And I remember.

Warrioress...your name, a whisper, my voice is a stranger in the darkness. Bellatrix, I say, come over here, away from that window. There is a flicker of mistrust in your eyes, as though you remembered who I am, or what I did.

I light a candle and the sudden flash of light turns the picture into negative, your hair and eyes are all white, blazing, for a second, in the black light. Bellatrix Black-and-white, without room for shades. That face and that name, they were feared once, by more than just yourself, you'd leave only just alive reminders of your mercilessness to make sure you were remembered. Blank-wiped souls and black-scarred hearts, a charcoal portrait of our time. But the colours are faded, if I look into your eyes now, I find nothing.

This dusty old picture book is the only thing that reaches you in your catatonia. You haven't let go of it since you found it on the shelf, you caress the shabby leather and guard it like a treasure, like a child. I remember how your sisters gave it to you for your seventeenth birthday, a collection of pictures of you, from infancy to the day you came of age. You never get tired of looking at those photographs, in fact, you hardly do anything else. I rarely look over your shoulder these days, I've seen them so often I know them by heart. There you are as a little girl, standing at Narcissa's cradle, there you are at a family trip to the beach, trying to set a jellyfish on fire, you and your sisters getting ready for one of your parents' famous Christmas parties, you in Slytherin colours, Rosier, Wilkes, me, Rodolphus and you in a row, slightly drunk as it seems - I remember the day the picture was taken, it was the summer after you finished Hogwarts. Less then a year later, each of us would have become a murderer.

You touch one of the photographs with a clumsy caress and mutter something that sounds like 'Cissy'.

Narcissa won't come, I tell you, Narcissa is dead. Narcissa was a traitor. No, Narcissa was a desperate mother who would have done anything for her child, even refuse the Dark Lord's bidding and pay with her life. She was a lost woman, and possibly the only one of us who remained human despite it all. I could not save her. In the end, I only managed to save myself. I was a traitor, but I spun my tales more carefully, emotionless, if you will. I had a plan.

(It was not my plan, I never wanted this.)

Coming to think of it, Albus's plan was not so much a strategy as an act of kindness. I told him it didn't make sense to sacrifice the queen for the pawns, but he merely smiled at me, the old fool. I'm not going to play chess, he said, if we start treating men as pawns we have already lost. He was so confident, so convinced of his ideals that I believed him, I truly believed him, and that was possibly the only reason why I did what he asked of me in the end.

He was - we were fools to think that innocence could survive a war like that. Hatred always defeats love in the end, no matter which side wins the fight. This truth is buried in those empty eyes of yours; you are a living reminder of the price we all have to pay.

It were six of them, standing around you in a circle, taking turns. The Weasley girl was among them, and Longbottom of course. I have no idea how they even managed to disarm you, but I guess their feverish hate for you gave them powers they had not known. The battle was already over when people noticed, closing up in disbelief, their eyes wide with terror, and it was Lupin who finally made them stop. I hoped they had killed you, it would have been merciful to let you die, but they had long forgotten how to be merciful. In fact, they were laughing.

If there's one thing I've learned about laughter, it is that those who never stop laughing are those who are hurt so deep they no longer have the strength to cry. And those who laugh loudest are probably those who hurt most. You laughed their innocence away, but they laughed last, loudest, louder even than your screams.

There were many voices, the laughter and the screams mingled with spit out words, and names... For mum, for dad, my brother, my sister, you certainly didn't cry for your sisters, did you? Names, so many, and Crucio. They did to you what you had done to them, curse for curse they paid you back.

I've entered you mind, once, when the after effects shook your body, and you stared at me wide-eyed, begging to make it stop. I wanted to know if you remembered what you had done to deserve such a fate, your crimes and the terrible pain you caused. I fell into darkness, a vast landscape of distorted pictures, years covered in haze like diluted aquarelles. Your memory ends just where the picture book does, with a seventeen-year-old girl, laughing, arm in arm with your now dead sisters and a row of soon-to-be murderers, and the woman you became remains a blank black page.

I have no explanation for it. Maybe it's a mere coincidence, maybe it's just irony or some kind of higher justice, or maybe somewhere in that twisted mind of yours, even you felt guilt.

Do you know, Bellatrix, that I envy you sometimes? That I wish I could at least unsee, unhear, unlearn things if I can't undo them? While it's your hell that you remember nothing, it's mine that I remember everything.

And now that I know the terrible feeling of having known a time when Bellatrix Lestrange and Severus Snape were innocent, when Neville Longbottom was just an incompetent fool and Ginny Weasley was a little girl with a crush on a celebrity and they had not tortured a woman into madness, only now do I understand the unbearable guilt the headmaster must have felt. The guilt of having known Tom Riddle, the child Tom Riddle, and let it all happen, of having realized too late that fear could not be stopped with fear, and that hatred could only be defeated with kindness. The trust he denied him he offered me twice.

He was the only one I have not betrayed.

It's time to get your food. You watch me leave, eyes moving frantically in dark holes your gaunt face comes alive once more with fear. It's a fundamental kind of fear, a fear of loss that only small children in their irrationality can feel this intensely. You're afraid that once I cross the threshold I will be gone, because in your mind there exists only this room and nothing apart from it, and anything that leaves will no longer be a part of your world. Don't worry, I tell you, I'm not leaving. Where would I be going? There might be a place reserved in hell for traitors like me, but none in this world. I'm the phantom of the war, faithless but with a hundred faces, always knowing which one to wear. I will be remembered too. As a man ready to kill, rotten to the core, forever.

Only you know nothing of all of that. You never found out that I sold you just as well, that it was me who led you into that trap. That this was how I bought my freedom yet again.

And, though guarding you is the only job I can still get, though this is the only place I am still welcome, that is the main reason why I'm here. Your oblivion is comforting. It's not even the fact that you need me (I've been needed before, Albus needed me and so did the Dark Lord) but the things you need me for; it's healing for once and not destruction, life, not death, the cure and not the disease. Ironically, you, of all people, are my last chance for redemption.

You smile at me, and your smile is genuine, almost warm. It is something you learned again. And sometimes I think this might not be hell after all, maybe we got a second chance, a second life, less dark, less lonely, with room for kindness. I know the answer is hidden somewhere in the depth of your mind, that ballroom of memories where the dead dance again, like watercolour painted over charcoal. Time has stopped, in your mind and in this house, to repeat itself and never rust. The present is nothing, none-existent, a mosaic of what-ifs and had-nots, of what we were, what we could have been and what we became instead. On the other side of the window. Undeserved.

End


End file.
